Uber Entertainment talks going free-to-play

The highly successful, much-lauded Xbox Live Arcade game Monday Night Combat is getting an F2P sequel, and it’s creators are now explaining what that will mean for the game.Joystiq chatted with the crew at Uber Entertainment at PAX Prime, and learned a bit about how the team is planning to handle the switch from paid XBLA to F2P PC game.

“Super Monday Night Combat is going to be the same basic world,” Uber Entertainment creative director John Comes explained to us at PAX last week. “We still have the same kind of lightheartedness, with the announcer and the mascot — that same happy, fast, punchy game.”

Some things will change though. For starters, Uber says they want everybody to be able to play for free all the time while experiencing all that the game has to offer. So, as an example, they mentioned they have plans to rotate the available characters from one week to the next. A character may not be free one week, but will be available the next. Though if you pay for the character, it will be available at all times, of course.

“Working on the Steam version of Monday Night Combat Classic, we really like the opportunity to update it frequently. That’s how we like to work internally – it was good that we could put it out there, and if we wanted to try something new, we could put it out there and see how the fans would react, tweak it and tweak it, and we liked working that way.”

“When we looked at what to do next, we always wanted to make Monday Night Combat free-to-play, and when we decided to do Super Monday Night Combat, it was a no-brainer. Free-to-play is what we wanted to do in the first place, and we get to update it very often, which is great.”

There’s also reportedly going to be an incentive program that will reward Monday Night Combat Classic purchasers in Super Monday Night Combat.